Cher said her late ex-husband Sonny Bono defrauded her financially during their time together as she rose to fame in Hollywood.

“He took all my money,” Cher said in an interview with The New York Times, published Sunday, ahead of the debut of the first part of her two-part book “Cher: The Memoir.” ‘I just thought: we are husband and wife. Half the things are his, half the things are mine. It didn’t occur to me that there was another way.”

Cher and Bono are best known as the pop duo and television variety team Sonny & Cher. But behind closed doors, Cher says Bono was like a “parent” who at one point took advantage of her financially. The two met when Cher was 16 and Bono was 27, a relationship she wouldn’t label as a “#MeToo moment” because she “lied” to him about her age.

In an effort to avoid living with her mother at the time, she took a room with Bono in exchange for cleaning and cooking services. However, a few years later they got married in 1964 and had children. And as the pair rose to stardom, Cher says Sonny became emotionally abusive and developed a “my way or the highway” mentality, claiming that Bono set up their company so that Cher was his employee.

“To this day,” Cher added, “I wish to God I could just ask, ‘Son, at what point, on what day, did you go, ‘Yeah, you know what?’ I’m going to take her money. ”

The couple divorced in 1975 and Bono died in a skiing accident in 1998.

“I woke up one morning – early, around five o’clock – and I thought: I’m not going to do this anymore. I’m leaving him,” Cher explained, adding that she told Bono she wanted to pursue an intimate relationship with the group’s guitarist and ultimately did so. “I started putting together a plan that was so dangerous that I don’t know how I had the guts to carry it out.”

It wasn’t until her relationship with film producer David Geffen that she became financially savvy.

“I didn’t know how to pay. I didn’t have a bank account,” Cher said. Nevertheless, Cher became a household name, regardless of the name she married, and forged her own path in the industry.

Her “Cher: The Memoir” will be published by HarperCollins on November 19.

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